“That was Hugo.”
“How long did you stay at the St. John’s practice, after Margot disappeared?” asked Strike, although he knew the answer.
“Six, seven months, I think,” said Gloria. “Long enough to see the new policeman take over. We were all pleased, because the first—Talbot, wasn’t it?—was quite strange. He bullied the life out of Wilma and Janice. I think that’s what made Wilma ill, actually. She had quite enough on her plate without the police hounding her.”
“You don’t think she drank, then?” asked Robin.
“Drank? That was all Dorothy’s malice,” said Gloria, shaking her head. “Dorothy was trying to pin the thefts on Wilma. Have you heard about that?”
Strike and Robin nodded.
“When she couldn’t prove that Wilma was taking money out of people’s bags, she put it about that she was drinking and the poor woman resigned. She was probably glad to leave, but it was still losing a salary, wasn’t it?
“I wanted to leave myself,” said Gloria, “but I was paralyzed. I had this really strange feeling that, if I just stayed there, the world would right itself. Margot would come back. It was only after she disappeared that I realized… what she’d been to me…
“Anyway,” sighed Gloria, “one night, months after she’d disappeared, Luca was really violent to me. I’d smiled at a man who opened a door for me as I left the pub with Luca, that’s what sparked it. He beat me like he’d never beaten me before, at his place—he had this little flat.
“I remember saying ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have smiled at him.’ And all the time I was saying it, I could see—in here –” Gloria tapped her head, “Margot watching me, and even while I was begging Luca to stop, and agreeing I’d behaved like a little slut, and I shouldn’t ever smile at strange men, I was thinking, I’m going, Margot. I’m going where he’ll never find me.
“Because it had clicked in my head at last. She’d told me I needed to be brave. It was no good waiting for anyone else to save me. I had to save me.
“After he’d calmed down, he let me go home to my grandparents” house, but he wanted to see me again later. It was always like that after he’d been really violent. He wanted extra contact.
“He hadn’t beaten me in the face. He never did, he never lost control like that, so I went back to my grandparents” and acted as though everything was fine. Went out to meet Luca that night, and he took me out for dinner, and that was the night he proposed, with a ring and everything.
“And I said yes,” said Gloria, with a strange smile and a shrug. “I put that ring on, and I looked down at it, and I didn’t even have to act happy, because I genuinely was. I thought That’ll buy some of my plane ticket. Mind you, I’d never flown before in my life. The idea of it scared me. But all the time, I could see Margot in my head. You’ve got to be brave, Gloria.
“I had to tell my grandparents I was engaged. I couldn’t tell them what I was really planning, because I was scared they wouldn’t be able to act, or that they’d try and confront Luca or, worse, go to the police. Anyway, Luca came round to the house to meet them properly, pretending to be a nice guy, and it was awful, and I had to act as though I was thrilled about all of it.
“Every single day after that, I bought all the newspapers, and circled all of the jobs abroad that I might have a chance of getting. I had to do all of it in secret. Typed up a CV at work and got a bus to the West End to post all the applications, because I was scared someone who knew Luca would see me putting lots of envelopes in the post.
“After a few weeks, I got an interview with a French woman who was looking for an English home help, to teach her kids English. What really got me the job was being able to type. She ran her own business from home, so I could do a bit of admin for her while the kids were at nursery. The job came with room and board, and my employer would buy my plane ticket, so I didn’t have to sell Luca’s ring, and pretend I’d lost it…
“You know, the day I went into St. John’s and told them I was resigning, a funny thing happened. Nobody had mentioned Margot for weeks. Immediately after she disappeared, it was all any of us could talk about, but then it became taboo, somehow. We had a new locum doctor in her room. I can’t remember his name. A new cleaner, too. But this day, Dorothy arrived, quite flustered, and she never showed any emotion, usually…
“This local… what’s the word?” said Gloria, clicking her fingers, for the first time lost in her native language. “We’d say un dingue… oh, you know, a crazy man, a loon… harmless, but strange. Big long beard, dirty, you used to see him wandering up and down Clerkenwell Road with his son. Anyway, he’d sort of accosted Dorothy in the middle of the street, and told her he killed Margot Bamborough.
“It had shaken Dorothy up, but in an odd way… please don’t think this is awful… I hoped it was true. Because although I’d have given anything to know Margot was alive, I was sure she was dead. She wasn’t the type to run away. And my worst nightmare was that Luca was responsible, because that meant it was all my fault.”
Robin shook her head, but Gloria ignored her.
“I only told my grandparents the truth the night before I was due to leave for France. I hadn’t let them spend any money on the wedding that wasn’t going to happen, but even so, it was a huge shock to them. I sat them down, and told them everything, except for the termination.
“Of course, they were appalled. At first, they didn’t want me to leave, they wanted me to go to the police. I had to explain why that was a terrible idea, tell them about the threats Luca had made, and all of that. But they were so glad I wasn’t marrying him, they accepted it in the end. I told them it would all die down, and I’d be back soon… even though I wasn’t sure that was true, or if it would be possible.
“My grandfather took me to the airport, early next day. We’d worked out a story, for when Luca came asking where I was. They were to say I’d been having doubts, because he’d been violent, and that I’d gone over to Italy to stay with some of Dad’s relatives, to think things over. We even concocted a fake address to give him. I don’t know whether he ever wrote to it.
“And that’s everything,” said Gloria, sitting back in the desk chair. “I stayed with my first employer for seven years, and ended up with a junior position in her firm. I didn’t visit London again until I heard Luca was safely married.” She took another sip of wine from the glass her husband had refilled. “His first wife drank herself to death at the age of thirty-nine. He used to beat her badly. I found all that out later.
“And I’ve never told another lie about myself,” said Gloria, raising her chin. “Never exaggerated, never pretended, only ever told the absolute truth, except on one point. Until tonight, the only person who knew about the abortion was Hugo, but now you two know, too.
“Even if you find out Luca was behind what happened to Margot, and I have to have that on my conscience forever, I owe her the truth. That woman saved me, and I’ve never, ever forgotten her. She was one of the bravest, kindest people I’ve ever known.”
67
There by th’vncertaine glims of starry night,
And by the twinkling of their sacred fire,
He mote perceiue a litle dawning sight…
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
They thanked Gloria for her time and her honesty. Having bidden her goodbye, Strike and Robin sat at the partners’ desk, each of them sunk in thought, until Strike offered Robin one of the pots of dehydrated noodles he kept for snacks in the office. She declined, instead taking a bag of mixed nuts unenthusiastically out of her bag, and opening it. Once Strike had added boiling water to the plastic pot, he returned to the desk, stirring the noodles with a fork.
“It’s the efficiency,” he said, sitting down again. “That’s what’s bugging me. Literally no trace of her anywhere. Somebody was either extraordinarily clever, or unprecedentedly lucky. And Creed still fits that picture best, with Luca Ricci a close second.”
“Except it can’t have been Luca. He’s got an alibi: Gloria.”
“But as she says, he knew people who could take care of making someone disappear—because what are the odds, if Margot was abducted off the street, that this was a truly one-person job? Even Creed had his unwitting accomplices. The dozy landlady, giving him that safe basement, and the dry cleaner letting him have the van that day and n—”
“Don’t,” said Robin sharply.
“Don’t what?”
“Blame them.”
“I’m not blaming them, I’m—”
“Max and I were talking about this,” said Robin. “About the way people—women, usually—get blamed for not knowing, or seeing—but everyone’s guilty of that kind of bias. Everyone does it.”